That
must be what hundreds of veteran internet developers are saying since
Microsoft is finally taking interest in embracing advanced web
technologies. After all, such technologies were typically
driven by browsers with scant market share like Google
Chrome or Opera, while Internet Explorer, the world's most used
browser lagged far behind. That meant that it was impractical
for companies to take full advantage of the latest internet
technologies, as few customers could actually use them.

At its
annual Mix conference Microsoft showed that would change, unveiling
a demo build of Internet Explorer 9, the successor to the
widely used IE
7 and IE 8. The demo included support for a host of HTML5
features; among them were h.264 embedded video (the kind that Google
is using to trial HTML5 versions of YouTube) and embedded audio (with
support for MP3/AAC codecs).

Microsoft is also supporting
scalable vector graphics (SVG), an XML-driven webpage technology
that's another hot topic. SVG allows rudimentary drawings of
things like lines or shapes. In that respect, it's similar to
some of the capabilities of Adobe's Flash. With both SVG and
HTML5 rendering, Microsoft is actually using DirectX
video acceleration via the Direct2D API. This means that
Microsoft may actually be beating Google and others when it comes to
these advanced standards, in terms of performance and speed.

Microsoft is also packing a faster Javascript engine
under the hood of IE 9. In tests, the new engine is rather
respectable -- about as fast as Firefox's script engine. It
still lags behind the Opera and Webkit (Google and Apple) engines,
but it's not even a release build yet, so that's pretty respectable
performance nonetheless.

But the best part of Microsoft's
announcement is that you can try the browser for yourself. It's
available for download in preview form here.
Beware the preview is only geared at developers and there's no
address bar (you have to go to the "Page" menu for
that.

And another word of warning -- IE 9 won't
support Windows XP, though. That's really not that
surprising if you think about it, but it may be a bit of a shock to
some.

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Yes, but I think that big step between 32bit and 64bit is because regular consumers face NOW the current "forced-move-to-64bits" situation because of RAM memory and technology moving forward... so it doesn't matter when this will happend°°, it could have been suffered years ago if most of people have moved to 64 bits...